MoJ ditches new court interpreting system in face of major backlash - thelawyer.com reports

thelawyer.com / News
/ 23 February 2012

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has decided to allow courts to revert to the old system of selecting interpreters from the National Register of Public Service Interpreters (NRPSI) in order to avoid further hearings being adjourned as a result of interpreters from a new agency failing to turn up to court.

The MoJ launched a new interpreter service on 30 January that required all court interpreters to be sourced from Applied Language Solutions (ALS).

However, since launch there have been reports of long delays and instances where interpreters were late, underprepared, underqualified or failed to turn up at all. This has resulted in a number of hearings being adjourned (16 February 2012).

A spokesman for the MoJ commented: “There have been some problems with short notice appointments in the first few weeks of the new system and so the courts have been told that they can use their own arrangements in the meantime to mitigate the number of hearings that are failing as a result of the contractor’s difficulties with sourcing interpreters at short notice.”